The first thing you notice is all the cars. The Potrero Hill housing projects occupy a strange landscape divided by Jersey barriers and concrete retaining walls that carve up the site’s topography. Endless rows of cars are parked along its curving streets and in front of 62 three- and four-story barracks-style buildings that step down the steep hill. It’s the first indication that this isolated, often forgotten section of the city is not that well connected to the thriving, upscale urbanism of San Francisco that surrounds it. “The beautiful green landscape, the Corbusian dream, just becomes parking,” says Gary Strang, FASLA, the founder of GLS Landscape | Architecture, the firm that was hired to radically reshape this place.

For Curteesha Cosby, who lives at Potrero, these parked cars are sometimes a refuge of last resort. When she’s walking her kids to school at 7:00 a.m. and hears gunfire, she hits the ground and rolls her children under them till it ends. She says she hears shooting nearly every day. She’s exhausted by Potrero. “I just want people to be happy and everyone to be safe,” she says. Her cousin was gunned down in the housing complex a few days before we spoke. Edward Hatter, the executive director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, a nonprofit serving the area, tells me the community is waiting for the retaliatory violence that often follows shootings.

Potrero Terrace and Annex has long been one of San Francisco’s most dysfunctional large-scale public housing developments. Residents complain of (more…)

Los Angeles is an intriguing place for 2017’s ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO. It’s a car-centric metropolis in the throes of a rebirth in public transportation, a drought-parched region with a remarkably complex water infrastructure, and an image-conscious city with a deceptively robust urban foundation. The October issue celebrates the ASLA Annual Meeting with a look at Los Angeles’s, and California’s, big designs on the future.

Christopher Hawthorne’s Third L.A. Project brings to the forefront issues, including density and equity, that Los Angeles—and Angelenos—face with the reinvention of the sprawling, single-family-home-dominated city. Waving away the clouds of optimism around marijuana legalization and production, Mimi Zeiger investigates the costs and benefits to the landscape. And in a city where entertainment is king, Studio-MLA goes big with three sports stadium projects in the Los Angeles area.

Up the coast, a public housing project on San Francisco’s Potrero Hillgets connected to the city by GLS Landscape | Architecture, while trying to stave off gentrification that could follow. And AECOM’s work on the South San Francisco Bay restoresecosystems once battered by the salt industry back to their natural habitat.

Glen Dake, ASLA, talks about his firm’s commitment to resiliency and “meeting people in their language,” in Interview. Two gardens at the storied Garden Museum in London get a redesign by Dan Pearson and Christopher Bradley-Hole in Plants. A remediation plan by Fred Phillips for an Indonesian tin mining site includes providing an alternative livelihood for artisanal miners, in Planning. And in Palette, subtle layers compose the designed landscapes of Pamela Burton & Company Landscape Architecture. All this plus our regular Books, Now, and Goods columns. The full table of contents for October can be found here.